Saturday, 17 January 2009

Wittenham Clumps and the St Michael Line

In South Oxfordshire there is an area called Wittenham Clumps. It is a popular nature reserve and consists of two large hills. One of them is Castle Hill, an iron age hill fort, and the other Round Hill or Sinodun Hill. In their book The Sun & the Serpent, Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller identify Wittenham Clumps as a highly significant Sacred site through which the St Michael Line, a ley line, passes as part of an alignment of sacred sites through the British Isles. On top of Round Hill, which they describe as "a hill top Sacred Grove", there is a node where the St Michael Line converges with the Mary and heads down to Dorchester Abbey and the Dyke Hills. They also visited Little Wittenham Church, which they noted was built on the site of an older wooden Saxon church,

"branches entwine to form a canopy where nature spirits peer down like the gargoyles and grotesqueries in a country church"

"..and it is impossible not to recall that churches are built to recall such natural places of sanctuary"